Terry Lane

Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre has an unusual origin story. It was founded in 1962 by an unlikely collective that included the publisher John Calder, serviceman-turned-bookseller Jim Haynes, impresario Richard Demarco, rugby administrator Tom Mitchell, actor John Malcolm, and the stage manager and director Terry Lane, who has died aged 87.

Their idea was to institute a theatre that would keep the anarchic, experimental and international spirit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – then only 15 years old – alive in the Scottish capital throughout the year. To dodge the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain, which was not abolished until 1968, it was founded as a theatre club.

Lane was instrumental in the Traverse’s early success. He designed and built the first iteration of the theatre in a former brothel known as Kelly’s Paradise off Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket, which was first used as a venue by Cambridge students John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor during the 1962 Edinburgh fringe, then served as its first artistic director. He was allegedly responsible for its name, too, due to a confusion around the terms “transverse” and “traverse”.”

The Traverse opened in January 1963, in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record. It survived a scare on its second night, when Colette O’Neil was stabbed by fellow performer Rosamond Dickson during the final scene of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.

“The snow was nine inches deep outside the theatre and people came with their hot water bottles, blankets and overcoats,” Lane recalled in a 2023 interview with Demarco. “We had rehearsed it very carefully in production so the knife would slide out of her hand and not actually penetrate. The knife did not slide out of Ros’s hand. It actually penetrated the stomach of Colette, who was rushed off to hospital. The headlines of “Actress stabbed in nightclub in Edinburgh” went around the world. It caused a sensation. Everybody realised that a new theatre had opened in Edinburgh.”

The young Traverse was incredibly prolific, its team producing 110 shows within three years, including 33 world premieres and 28 UK premieres. Lane only stayed for a year but still directed bold stagings of plays by Fernando Arrabal, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Stanley Eveling, William Snyder and Yukio Mishima. His production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi involved the audience throwing balls of cotton wool at each other and the lead actor beating up a spectator every night.

Born in Woodford, Northamptonshire in 1937 (exact date unknown), Lane left school at 15 and began his career in the office of impresario Jack Hylton, then worked as a stage manager in Bromley, Pitlochry, Perth and Scarborough. It was at the tiny in-the-round theatre – the UK’s first – founded above a public library in Scarborough by Stephen Joseph that Lane began directing and developed the love of intimate, alternative stage layouts that stayed with him throughout his career. It was at Pitlochry Festival Theatre that he met John Malcolm, and through his relationship with Demarco became involved with the Traverse.

Lane left the Traverse and Edinburgh in 1964, going on to direct the pilot production of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Theatregoround programme, which toured London boroughs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and stage seasons in Scarborough, Pitlochry, Stoke-On-Trent, Bournemouth, Cardiff and Kidderminster.

In 1968, Lane was appointed the first director of productions at Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre, which had been founded six years earlier, where he staged Eugene Ionesco’s Jacques and the anonymous Elizabethan drama, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

In 1973, Lane left professional theatre to open a bookshop in Helensburgh with his wife Rosamond – the actor who accidentally stabbed O’Neil at the Traverse – whom he had married in 1965.

He retired in 1995 and moved to Panicale, Italy, where he painted oil portraits and wrote two books, The Full Round in 2006, a biography of Stephen Joseph, who founded the in-the-round theatres in Scarborough and Stoke-On-Trent at which Lane had worked, and Side by Side in 2007, a personal history of the founding of the Traverse.

A statement from the Traverse read: “We’re saddened to hear of the passing of Terry Lane, the founder and first artistic director of the Traverse Theatre.”

It paid tribute to Lane’s “vision, passion and enduring legacy” and credited him with helping “establish the Traverse as a home for new writing and theatrical risk-taking”.

Rosamond died of cancer in 2005, aged 67. Lane died in Norwich on August 7 and is survived by three children.